27 abr. 2005

It's not really about a division between "avant-garde" and "school of quietude." This very division implies that, say, Billy Collins is a very good poet within the quietudinous mode, something that is very far from being demonstrated. He is surely a lightweight by any measure. When Bill Knott says, with his characteristic savage facetiousness: "they don't put us in their anthologies, why should we put them in ours"-- this begs the question by imagining two symmetrical worlds of poetry, each with a right to exclude the "riffraff." The school of quietude is not a school with definable borders, but simply a boring attitude toward poetry. Let's keep poetry safe for boring poets! seems to be the watchword.

Really the conversation is so poor that we have a reviewer in BOOKSLUT talking about the Prose Poem as a new and controversial genre, as though Tony Tost had found this obscure and little known form in which to work!

It's not really about accessibility or difficulty either. It is abject mauvaise foi to hold up Rae Armantrout as a representative of difficult poetry when she is one of the easiest poets out there. Let's talk instead about whether she is interesting or not.

"Beginners are being taught to think,

drawing straight linesbetween dotsto reveal hidden shapes"

Sometimes Armantrout seems to be telling me something I already know. This seems to be a facile critique of a certain kind of "thinking," reduced to a childhood exercise in connect-the-dots. When I look closely, though, it is not so clear. After all, that exercise might not be as simplistic as it seemed, and connecting the dots can be a powerful metaphor. Where the point seems most accesssible and blatant, I become unsure of my response. Is her poetry TOO accessible at times? That would be a much more fruitful conversation to have.

Sure, don't you cringe when the poet tells you something you already know in too obvious a way? Like I try to explain in my Paul Auster post above: a poet cannot telegraph her punches too blatantly. Armantrout does that occasionally, the way Auster might bring in the holocaust for added emphasis, in case we didn't "get it." Poetry communicates meaning indirectly most of the time. A too explicit development of a them may well be cringe-worthy.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."